Category: Nine Bells

Just loaded all my ripped Phurpa CDs on to an SD card for the mp3 player. Late breakfast was an omelette made with eggs from our chickens and finished with a chive salt I infused myself with salt from up the road in Maldon and chives from my garden. That’s what my year is going to be like.

I’m drawing up plans to begin revamping the back garden this month. I got a couple of A5 hardback notebooks for Xmas, and am wondering what use to put them to. I intend to look at phone screens less this year (i developed a bad habit of reading on my phone when one of the cats sits on me in the evening and pins my left hand down, as is her wont). I read something like 56 books last year, in the end, and I’m thinking about doubling that this year. I have a backlog.

I maintain this notebook because having a daily-ish digital log is valuable for my work and general tracking of life – I’ve been doing it for so long, over various now-gone sites, that it’s baked into my practice. I may try and expand what it does.

I have a lot to do this year, and am pushing at the boundaries of that to make more time for self-directed projects – a few in collaboration, but largely things in mind that I want to do myself.

I intend a year of moving more and doing more. We’ll see how it goes. But it will definitely be a year of being less connected to whatever the hell is going on out there in the digital world, and being less part of anything but my own choices about how to live 2026.

While it should always be borne in mind that the art life was a lot easier for David Lynch because he had a staff, his description of the art life resonates with me still: “You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint, and that’s it.” I really need to quit or at least cut down on the smokes again – I can’t get vaping to work for me – and as I write this just after noon, I’m on my fourth espresso of the day.

That said: there is little better than standing off from a piece of work, with a cup of coffee, and thinking about it, or going outside and lighting up and thinking about what you’ve just done or what you’re going to do next. Without interruption. That moment where it’s just you and what you’re making. The thing that didn’t exist before you put it down, and what it makes you think about and around it. There is a moment where it’s both what’s here and what’s next.

And you want that without interruption. No devices making noise. Nobody else around. Because the awful thing about that particular art life is that you do it alone. And that’s why Lynch’s art life was a privilege: he had people to create that cone of silence around him, to answer the door and wrangle family and feed the cats and pick up the phone and all the other things that intrude on the creative space. Real life, basically.

The art life is a nice place to visit.

CONNECTED:

• https://warrenellis.ltd/?s=%22David+Lynch%22
• MULHOLLAND DRIVE

So I spent today rewriting five pages and then deleting one on one piece and then rewriting two pages on another piece and then saying fuckit and sending both sets of pages to their respective artists and we will see how they land but even getting a handful of pages roughly how you want them and then getting them off the desk is a victory, not a big victory, not like those freak days where I’ve written an entire script with no obvious immediate flaws in a single day, but both the joy and friction of this life is that every day is different and the trick is to accept that this is a rare and wonderful way to live even though those pages are probably not what were needed – and yet there is always tomorrow.

And then, dear reader, he remembered that, for all his excitement about the arrival of winter, winter in this country can last six or seven months, and by April he will be verging on insanity and will have less Vitamin D in his body than those beasties that live off black smokers in the deepest lightless trenches of the ocean

Oversized Riggs twill workshirt, Russian submariner boatneck longsleeve under it, Carhartt double-front utility work pant, random purple kerchief around the back of my neck, merino socks, &Sons drover boots. Ayahuasca pendant that herself brought home from one of her stays with the Shipibo in Peru and the sailing thimble bracelet from Eighty Eight Degrees. Long-cut black leather coat, merino scarf and watchcap. I’m sitting outside with a glass of wine. Winter is here. This is what we do. At home, all the winter clothes are out and on hangars waiting for mood and weather.

You can dress for the job you want, or dress for the job you invented.

A weird habit I’ve settled into over the last few years. I save the difficult books, the long books and the old books for winter. There’s something about the long evenings that makes me withdraw into filling in the gaps in my reading – the collected Joseph Conrad, the Shakespeare I haven’t gotten to, another crack at the wonderful but exhausting MOBY DICK – and the deep books that rewards hours-long sittings. Winter’s breath was upon the air this morning. Jack Frost is clearing his throat, and now I’m thinking about clearing the fireplace and arranging the winter books.